Modern aircraft, both combat and civil, are representative of the most complex “man-machine” devices ever produced and they have now been developed to the stage where, relatively speaking, little more will be achieved by the normal evolutionary processes. Increasing attention is, therefore, now being paid to new configurations, new materials and new uses of technologies such as safe automatic controls in an attempt to break through the present limits of performance, safety and cost.

One of the most rapidly advancing technologies at the present time is microelectronics and its particular application in miniature digital computers. Professor Gosling of the University of Bath recently described microelectronics as a “technology which makes negligible demands on materials and energy and yet is already changing the rules for future social evolution by making possible intelligent machines, which achieve biological orders of complexity at trivial cost”.